Milena Markovic: One needs to understand and love, and read Kant
Poet and playwright Milena Markovic, winner of the NIN Award for the novel "Children", believes that everything that is happening today in the world, when the topic of the pandemic has already been forgotten because a new one has come, indicates the problems of the so-called Western civilizations and the system of liberal capitalism. The author of plays, such as "The Forest Shining" and "Puppet Ship", which significantly influenced dramatic writing, and even the theater in Serbia, says in an interview with SEEcult.org that compassion is something which can possibly result in doing a good deed or reacting to injustice, but that rarely happens. Because, the largest percentage of people live by the principle: I mind my own business. It should not be separated from: we mind our own business, which can refer to family, class, race...
In her opinion, humanity has always been the same, except that today there are harsh wars in propaganda where - depending on the occasion - a certain part of humanity is declared inhuman. Then, the unthinking people - in the delusion of their small-minded opinions, repeat it like parrots.
"All people are born of a mother, they live and crave, they have or don’t have abilities, and then they die. One should understand and love, the same way as Christ understood and loved. In any case, it should be strived for. Everyone is deserving and not deserving. It is always a question of power – the one who measures and chooses - also determines merit", stated Milena Markovic.
Noting that everything has two sides, Milena Markovic points out that from the standpoint of capitalist democracy, the human being has every right to free himself from the shackles of family duties and roles, nation, religion, ideology, various imposed authorities and make his/her life have full freedom of productive individualism. The result, however, can be a frightened, lonely, self-sufficient consumer, living in constant longing.
Milena Markovic also states that compassion is something which can result in a human being doing a good deed or reacting to injustice in certain situations. But that rarely happens.
"The largest percentage of people live by the principle: I mind my own business. We should not separate that from: we mind our own business which can refer to family, class, race. There were revolutionaries who did not live under that banner - monks, saints. They thought of humanity.
Artists rarely belong to that type, it is only important for them to leave a mark. The lie lies in the yard, among other things. There is one specific feature of artists - at a certain moment they seriously start to think that they are better than others and that they deserve unconditional admiration at every moment of their lives. Another thing is that they often don't know much. The mind is a consumable thing, the artistic mind is not practiced by knowledge, and knowledge is not primary thing. And then you have the situation when various performers interpret the situation in today's civilization as sheep without a shepherd. So, one of the worst lies is when you lie to yourself", stated Milena Markovic.
Milena Markovic considers theses on state pathology to be superficial, and even propaganda narratives that are deliberately used to denigrate a nation or a system.
"The pathology of time is already interesting for artists. For example, ‘Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ originated in Victorian England, and Welbeck came out of a hedonistic liberal cauldron… You also have our pathology - me and my fellow writers from the region. I call it ‘wine and guitars’. Family pathologies are the source of every artist. The question of style remains, whether you are Bronte or Kafka", stated Milena Markovic.
The entire interview (in Serbian) can be found on this link.
(SEEcult.org)
Funded by the International Relief Fund for Organisations in Culture and Education 2021 of the German Federal Foreign Office, the Goethe-Institut and other partners, goethe.de/relieffund
